Going to the chapel...

Wedding invitations have been on my mind a lot lately. My sister got engaged back in February and I offered to do her invitations for her as my gift to the happy couple. I also have another friend who approached me and asked if she could hire me to do her invitations. I’m so honoured and pleased that they like my work and that they trust me to create the stationery for their special days. That means so much to me and I couldn’t be happier.

I actually got into paper crafting when I myself got engaged. In my professional life, I had been doing graphic design for quite some time, so the interest in paper, printing techniques and eye-catching designs was already quite firmly in place. This seemed like a natural extension for me and I really wanted to create an invitation that was ours and ours alone.

After picking our colours (we each ended up picking one, which was nice), I started searching for paper merchants and stumbled across Paper and More. I ordered samples and ended up being quite impressed with both the cost and the quality of the paper available, not to mention how quickly everything was delivered (six business days for the cheapest option). The one downside to Paper and More is that they only deliver within the States. At the time, we were living in Virginia, so that wasn’t a problem. Now that I’m back in Canada, I had to go through their customer service (which is excellent – the customer service rep who helped me was super nice and everything went so smoothly) to have the paper for my sister’s invitations delivered to our friends in Indiana. Since I’m seeing one of them this weekend, it all (very happily!) works out.

Anyway, being so preoccupied with all things wedding invitation-related, it only seemed natural that I should showcase my own wedding invitations in today’s post. I ended up doing all of the stationery for our wedding – invitations, favour tags, programs and thank you cards. We both wanted simple and elegant stationery, so I created this design for the invitations, using crocuses as the design element (please excuse the whiting out of personal details - there's just no pretty way to do that!):

The reply card also featured a crocus and was nestled inside a pretty silver A2 envelope:

Finally, we had a double-sided directions/map card, but I couldn't figure out a way to do that without having them one big mess of whited out bits.

 I don’t have any pictures of the rest of the stationery, but they all featured butterflies, since I saw this great idea and ended up making all of the bouquets out of feather butterflies (purple, silver and white). Our theme for the decorations became butterflies and flowers (we held our wedding at my parent’s farm and my Mom slaved over her flowers all year just for the occasion – they were beautiful!) with feather butterflies scattered over the tables and decorating the cake, and my Mom’s flowers growing everywhere. We also gave away silver flower pots with little purple heartsease seeds inside as our favours. Here are some wedding day pictures:

Even my hair had butterflies in it (photo by Steve)

Heading down the aisle with my Dad, framed by Mom's flowers (photo by Steve)

Posing with my Mom (photo by Steve)

Moose and his sister (photo by Steve)

'Cause every farm wedding requires hay bale pictures! (photo by Rufus)

And combine pictures, of course! (photo by Rufus)

(photo by Rufus)

I love the idea of using wedding invitations and stationery as a way to introduce a theme for a wedding. I am so happy with how everything tied together. Everything was beautiful and our special day couldn’t have been better!

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone. We’re off to the States for the next few days and I’m very excited! See you next week!